


see your breath in the air

by kiiouex



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Canonical Death Mention, Gen, Mostly Hugs, Some Ghostly Bullshit, Suicide mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-07
Updated: 2017-02-07
Packaged: 2018-09-22 14:40:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9611894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex
Summary: Ronan wants him gone; Ronan wants to be gone himself, back to that morning when Noah was as alive as any of them, if a bit less showy about it.[Set the night after the Gangsey learn Noah is dead]





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is the kind of thing I'd put on tumblr, if tumblr didn't make my archival heart weep :V mostly brought to you by all the 180km/h gusts we've been getting
> 
> Beta'd by [the usual suspect](http://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid) who is still a gift to this earth.

It’s the wind that wakes Ronan up. Four-something in the morning and the gale outside is screaming, making all the big, beautiful warehouse windows rattle and groan. The wind is pushing in on the walls, hurtling through any cracks, doing it’s damndest to remind people that their little structures exist at nature’s grace, and making a terrible racket all the while.

Ronan means to just throw a cursory glance at the window and roll over, but the white glimmer of a spectre stops him short. Noah is sitting cross-legged on the foot of his bed facing the window, not blinking, not moving, not breathing. Ronan’s room is hallowed ground, but he doesn’t think he has it in him to chase Noah out today, not when the wind is pulling at every piece of Monmouth that might be loose and not when Noah’s room is little more than a closed door to disappear behind.

Noah doesn’t move when Ronan sits up, but his cold shoulders flinch every time the gale hits hard enough to make the glass bulge in. At least Chainsaw is quiet in her cage, conceding the air to the bigger cacophony.

“Noah,” Ronan says, and then when Noah doesn’t reply, “You creepy fuck, look at me.”

Noah does not look at him; Ronan thinks that he should have gone out, taken his car literally anywhere so long as it was away from the haunted house, buried himself in music or drink or Kavinsky, anything alive. He’d known he wouldn’t be able to handle Noah now that he knew Noah was bones, dust, a faded impression of a boy crumpled up on his duvet.

“Fine,” Ronan says. “Just sit there and haunt me. I’ll get you fucking exorcised in the morning.” He’s too tired for this, his head still hurts from everything he downed as a chaser to grief, and the longer Noah sits there not moving the tighter the winch in Ronan’s chest pulls, nameless sorrow a tangled spool around his heart.

He has never been able to forget that Noah was the one to find him with his wrists open after his subconscious had shredded them, the coward’s version of the coward’s way out. Resentment usually wins out in the mess of his conflicting feelings, but in the core of it there is still the fact that Noah saw him the closest to death that he has ever been, and managed to get something done about it. Ronan is seven years too late to return the favour.

Noah’s head dips a fraction; his fingers find the bruise on his cheek, and in the sparse light of the storm, it looks like a hollow, like a hole, like if he turned just a little more to the left then Ronan could see right through to the backs of his teeth. There’s a tremor in his shoulders that gets worse with every lash of the wind outside. Ronan wants him gone; Ronan wants to be gone himself, back to that morning when Noah was as alive as any of them, if a bit less showy about it.

He says, “For _fuck’s sake,_ Czerny,” and butchers the pronunciation, throwing the sheets back as he hurtles himself off the bed with the same sudden jaggedness he applies to hurtle himself everywhere. He grabs Noah by the shoulders and shakes, and the ghost’s eyes slide up to him without real focus, black and empty. Even through his sweater, he’s cold, and for a moment Ronan is gripped by a manic kind of curiosity over whether the sweater is a ghost, too, or if it’s just ghostly, if it’s the one Noah died in. _Seven years_ in a school uniform. It’s the worst afterlife Ronan can imagine.

“Chair-knee,” Ronan tries, enunciating as poorly as Gansey had. 

Noah blinks until his pupils stop consuming him, and then his expression folds into something like a pout. “Czerny,” he says, in a gap in the gale. “It’s not _that_ hard.”

“Like fuck it’s not. Where are you even from?” Ronan speaks for the sake of it, but it’s a relief to watch Noah’s expression sink further into sullenness. There’s something petulantly human to it, a quality that Noah too often lacks. At least that makes sense now, Ronan thinks, viciously bitter. Too much of Noah is explained away by the fact of his death; Ronan had preferred him alive and anomalous.

Noah’s thin shoulders slope a little more hopelessly down under Ronan’s hands, and he murmurs, “The storm is loud,” possibly as an apology or excuse for being in Ronan’s room, and probably not as a reason for him to have been staring through to the ether on the end of Ronan’s bed.

“No shit.” Ronan’s still groggy, and mostly on Noah’s behalf. The acrid well of grief in him is confused by Noah’s ongoing presence, because apparently there’s dead and then there’s _dead_ and so far Noah is only one of the two. “Come on,” he says eventually, turning back to the bed, “I’m fucking tired.”

Ronan leaves the covers pulled down as an invitation, one that Noah accepts with a shameless ease that sits strangely on a boy who seems to practice his sentences a few times in his head before he lets them out of his mouth. Noah crawls in beside him, graceless and freezing, stealing all the heat from Ronan’s bare arms as they’re wrapped around him.

Together they’re insulated by the covers, even as all the windows rattle. In the next room over Gansey is doubtlessly awake and probably wandering, but Ronan doesn’t think his mourning will be interrupted. He presses his chin to the top of Noah’s head, thinking of how Noah often smells conspicuously of nothing and sometimes inconspicuously of dirt. “Sorry you fucking died.”

“Yeah,” Noah says, sounding almost melancholy, before he creeps his frigid fingers under Ronan’s singlet and snickers at the shudder he produces.

“ _Fuck_ you, rotter,” Ronan snaps, but lets Noah’s hands stay on his back, unpleasantly cold and clammy as they may be. “Can’t believe you never told me. You know all _my_ secrets.”

“Yeah,” Noah agrees again, “But I haven’t told them to anyone else. And you never listened when I said I was dead.”

That might well be true, which made Ronan uncomfortable enough to ignore it. Instead he thinks about the two of them, and impossibility, and what his God might make of ghosts, aware that he’s not likely to start getting answers now. “Wonder what Gansey’s going to make of you,” Ronan murmurs eventually.

Noah shrugs, a weak gesture from only one of his shoulders. He’s soft with sleep, even if he hasn’t gotten any warmer, and Ronan suspects that he’s not going to be around in the morning. If that’s the best Noah can get, that’s the best he can give; they should both be more than used to compromising by now.

**Author's Note:**

> I also have a [tumblr](http://kiiouex.tumblr.com/) :^)


End file.
